A Premise Salesman with Some Things on His Mind

Replying to an Email and then I am Finished

I received a comment regarding the “partisan generalizations” in my previous post. Ok, fair enough. And I guess I can link to some data. The preponderance of data supports a much more progressive agenda, not the opposite. Just follow the links.

But let’s look at my generalizations from the premises conservatives use to make their arguments. If, for example, less regulation and lower taxes creates jobs, well…where are the jobs? If consolidating wealth with the “job creators” creates jobs, where are the jobs? Where is the growth?

Or how about this one, if war is peace, where is the peace? I remember a classic Vietnam-era protest t-shirt, fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity.

Excuse my language, but we’re being fucked.

We went from an era of prosperity and surplus to an era of decline and deficits in an awfully quick hurry. Blaming Obama, the guy asked to catch our juggernaut economy in free fall and toss it skyward again as if it were a helium balloon, helps no one, especially when the de-regulating anti-government tax cutters won’t take any of the blame or offer any support. They simply want more opportunity to do more of the same which hasn’t worked so well. Isn’t that clear enough?

We live in an era of conservative policies and things don’t look so great. What is so complicated about this?

Keep in mind, too, that we don’t live in the 1950s anymore. The United States economy needs to compete globally. If our competitive advantage is going to rely solely on tax cuts and less regulation, we haven’t much of a chance. Just as importantly you have to look at where the labor market is priced now. We might be able to get all the labor growth we wanted — if workers were willing to work for $10 a day.

But it isn’t even certain that lower cost labor would bring jobs to this country. Our infrastructure lags, for one thing. China and India invest in their economies as we turn and run the other way.

And let’s suppose we do drive down the cost of labor here in order to bring jobs here. In an economy driven by household spending that isn’t a good formula.

We need to reconfigure our strategy and reset our competitive advantage in the global market. God, listening to a policy speech given by Kurt Bills — a GOP candidate for U S Senate challenging Amy Klobuchar — was painful. I was embarrassed for him. He hasn’t a clue about the economy…and he’s a high school economics teacher! Is it any wonder we struggle so?

I look at it this way. If conservatives have sound principles to support their supply-side economic arguments, let’s see them. Let’s see them in context. We are in a recession. Explain the supply side model in an environment where cash is plentiful and demand is down.

Don’t bring out the faux idol Reagan, either. First off, he wasn’t today’s brand of conservative. Secondly, he didn’t have the rosiest economic record either. When the economy did start to recover, it recovered on the momentum of evolving markets in new technologies…and some bubbles inflated by deregulation, but that’s a story people on the right don’t want to hear.

That’s enough from me. I am going to disappear in my dreams. As promised I’ll write about those next.